Why are cities usually warmer than rural areas? Scientist have long known that cities retain heat more than rural areas, a phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI), which is largely due to the impact of anthropogenic heating, or human-caused heating. | Continue reading
Night-time pollinators such as moths may visit just as many plants as bees, and should also be the focus of conservation and protection efforts, a new study from the University of Sheffield suggests. | Continue reading
Do whales increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere? | Continue reading
Three Chinese astronauts working at the country's space station have returned safely to Earth, state media reported Sunday, hailing the mission as a "complete success". | Continue reading
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end, and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. | Continue reading
People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger. | Continue reading
The world should see the first draft of a highly anticipated and much needed international treaty to combat plastic pollution by the end of November, 175 nations gathered in Paris decided Monday after five days of grueling talks. | Continue reading
Early tests indicate that the recent mass death of thousands of seabirds along Chile's northern coast were not caused by avian flu, authorities said Friday. | Continue reading
Three major chemical manufacturers announced Friday they will pay nearly $1.2 billion to settle claims that they contaminated water sources across the United States with harmful "forever chemicals" known as PFAS. | Continue reading
Hanoi residents flocked to the Vietnamese capital's air-conditioned shopping malls on Saturday to escape power cuts at home, as the grid struggled to cope with the high demand caused by soaring heat. | Continue reading
While judges, lawyers and support staff at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire, keep the American justice system buzzing, thousands of humble honeybees on the building's roof are playing their part in a more important task—feeding the world. | Continue reading
When one thinks of movie reviews, one might see them as harbingers of success or failure at the box office. Some researchers have previously found that both positive and negative reviews correlate to box office revenues, and the effect of negative reviews diminishes over time. | Continue reading
If New York is the city that never sleeps then how's this for keeping you up at night? It is also sinking. | Continue reading
A European spacecraft around Mars sent its first livestream from the red planet to Earth on Friday to mark the 20th anniversary of its launch, but rain in Spain interfered at times. | Continue reading
Some 10,000 people on Friday were ordered to evacuate from a city in the Canadian province of Quebec in the face of advancing wildfires, officials said. | Continue reading
A University of Virginia-led study about a class of materials called associative polymers appears to challenge a long-held understanding of how the materials, which have unique self-healing and flow properties, function at the molecular level. | Continue reading
Predicting a protein's location within a cell can help researchers unlock a plethora of biological information that's critical for developing future scientific discoveries related to drug development and treating diseases like epilepsy. That's because proteins are the body's "wor … | Continue reading
In a new study, bioscientists argue that strengthening the protection given to areas already protected under law or by local communities is as critical for safeguarding biodiversity as creating new protected areas. | Continue reading
While neural networks can help to improve the accuracy of fluid flow simulations, new research shows how their accuracy is limited unless the right approach is taken. By embedding fluid properties into neural networks, simulation accuracy can improve by orders of magnitude. | Continue reading
Producing energy on Earth through nuclear fusion, the type of reaction that powers the sun, has proven to be a major challenge. The extreme conditions needed for such a reaction require the walls of a nuclear fusion device to be made of a material with a particular set of mechani … | Continue reading
The bonds between clusters of elements in the fourteenth group of the periodic table are known to be fickle. Ranging from the nonmetal carbon, to the metalloids silicon and germanium, to the metals tin and lead, all these elements share the same configuration of valence electrons … | Continue reading
Magnetic domains walls are known to be a source of electrical resistance due to the difficulty for transport electron spins to follow their magnetic texture. This phenomenon holds potential for utilization in spintronic devices, where the electrical resistance can vary based on t … | Continue reading
A new study shows that the closing of education and childcare facilities in Germany during the coronavirus pandemic actually had an impact on parents' employment, as the opening of facilities led to a rebound in their work hours. For example, parents whose children had at least p … | Continue reading
Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) can help facilitate sustainable development, and PEB intervention strategies are developed to guarantee PEB effects. However, in most cases PEB intervention is given less importance than environmental education. | Continue reading
Usually, the two characterizations of a material are mutually exclusive: something is either stiff, or it can absorb vibrations well—but rarely both. However, if we could make materials that are both stiff and good at absorbing vibrations, there would be a whole host of potential … | Continue reading
The central region of Texas is a known hotspot of biological wonders. For the last five years, Dr. JoVonn Hill, an Assistant Professor and Director of the Mississippi Entomological Museum (MEM) at Mississippi State University, and his colleagues have made scientific expeditions t … | Continue reading
Scientists from the University of Tsukuba obtained a new theoretical equation for the propagation of ultrasonic waves through liquids containing encapsulated bubbles. They found that including the compressibility of the bubble shell was vital for accurately predicting the behavio … | Continue reading
Fruit flies can be truly annoying when they are buzzing around your living room or landing in your wine. But we have much to thank these tiny nuisances for—they revolutionized biological and medical science. | Continue reading
With the government under pressure to devise policies that help curb excessive consumption of unhealthy foods and drinks, new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) finds that banning multibuy deals has the opposite effect. | Continue reading
Unlocking the potential of laboratory-crafted DNA, known as synthetic DNA, holds the key to groundbreaking advancements across multiple domains, according to quantum biologists from the University of Surrey. | Continue reading
Dog owners are likely familiar with the respiratory disease commonly known as kennel cough; while most cases have been historically mild, a more severe form of the infection is on the rise. | Continue reading
Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty have more in common than their origins as classic fairy tale figures and, now, part of Disney's famous roster of characters. Their fairy tales are also full of gender bias and stereotypes, according to literature scholars––and now AI. | Continue reading
A locally found pathogenic fungus, Beauveria australis, has for the first time been observed infecting imported dung beetles in Australia. | Continue reading
Researchers at Tohoku University and Tsinghua University have introduced a next-generation model membrane electrode that promises to revolutionize fundamental electrochemical research. This innovative electrode, fabricated through a meticulous process, showcases an ordered array … | Continue reading
In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet show that recombinant spider silk protein hydrogels have many attractive features. They allow encapsulation of cells and bioactive molecules simply by incubation at 37°C. They are transparent, which allows monitoring of encapsu … | Continue reading
Beech leaf disease (BLD) is an emerging threat to North American forest ecosystems. It was first discovered in northeastern Ohio in 2012, and has already spread to 12 additional U.S. states and Canadian provinces. At first the cause of the disease was unknown, and the sick and dy … | Continue reading
Submerged macrophytes are declining in many shallow lakes around the world, with more algae and free-floating plants taking their place. But an opposite trend is also emerging: water bodies with improved water quality are increasingly experiencing a mass growth of aquatic plants. … | Continue reading
How does a future-proof, circular and sustainable plastics economy look like? The answer is a balance ranging from plastics reduction to a sustainable use of recyclable plastics. After all, the increasing demand for plastics in high-value applications such as food packaging, car … | Continue reading
A new paper published today in Zootaxa reveals a new species of forest frog has been identified in New South Wales, and concerningly it warrants listing as endangered. | Continue reading
How do you weigh a galaxy? It's an astronomical challenge, particularly if it's the galaxy you call home. It turns out there are several ways to get a handle on the mass of the Milky Way, and a recent study posted on the arXiv pre-print server summarizes these methods to present … | Continue reading
With an estimated 16 million residents, Lagos is the most densely populated state in Nigeria. It's under immense pressure to transport its huge population. According to a global ranking of mobility in cities, Lagos was ranked worst out of 60 cities across the world in 2022. Famou … | Continue reading
A trickle of studies warning that the enormous variety of living things on Earth is diminishing has turned into a flood. The evidence for these losses within regions and globally is undeniable. But data on biodiversity, and what is causing its decline, is still patchy—restricted … | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered why your dog is eating your beautifully cropped lawn or nibbling at the grass at the dog park? | Continue reading
Brazil's coastal waters teem with a rich array of species that paint a living tapestry beneath the waves. This underwater world is particularly special because many of its species are endemic—they are found nowhere else on Earth. The southwestern Atlantic is home to 111 endemic r … | Continue reading
The world awoke one morning in late March 2023 to the news that at least 38 Central and South American migrants had died in a fire in a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. | Continue reading
From "White Lotus" to "Succession," there's high demand for television dramas about the super rich. The characters on these shows are typically portrayed as entitled, hollow and sad. But they aren't necessarily depicted as unintelligent. So are rich people rich because they are s … | Continue reading
Fifty years ago, on June 1, 1973, astronomers around the world were introduced to a powerful and perplexing new phenomenon called GRBs (gamma-ray bursts). Today sensors on orbiting satellites like NASA's Swift and Fermi missions detect a GRB somewhere in the sky about once a day … | Continue reading
(Editor's note: This article mentions acts of intimate partner violence against First Nations people.) | Continue reading